“Plaintiffs may struggle to prove jawboning because the government has secretly communicated with the private companies it is coercing. Americans may not even know they were censored by their government.”

— Senate summary of the JAWBONE Act.

FIRE backs JAWBONE Act

Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden have introduced the bipartisan JAWBONE Act, backed by FIRE, which would allow Americans to sue federal officials who pressure individuals and private entities to censor lawful speech, a practice known as “jawboning.”

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“Jawboning has proven to be an enduring, bipartisan problem, and we know we cannot rely on platforms alone to protect our rights,” explains. “The JAWBONE Act empowers Americans to take their rights into their own hands.”

Illinois adopts social media tax

Illinois’ new budget imposes a first-of-its-kind tax on social media platforms, raising serious First Amendment concerns and setting the stage for a legal challenge. In his latest, says the proposal uses a vague definition of social media, fails to clearly define key terms like “user,” singles out social media companies, and above all, is just plain unconstitutional.

We’re not surprised to see a proposal like this riddled with flaws. As states have attempted to turn around the losing streak social media regulation has faced in court, we’ve seen a number of half-baked schemes to find some kind of creative workaround . . . Fortunately for free speech, the courts aren’t impressed. An attempt to punish speech is an attempt to punish speech, any way it’s structured.

Diabetes society ejects researchers

The American Diabetes Association ejected several researchers from its annual conference for distributing copies of an editorial critical of President Trump that had been published in the ADA’s own journal. weighs in:

Allowing conference attendees to hand out copies of an editorial is not the same as the organization itself promoting the editorial or adopting it as an official position. If the ADA really believes distribution of the editorial endangered its tax-exempt status, it raises an obvious question: Why didn’t the same concern stop it from publishing the editorial in the first place?

U. of Alabama shutters student mags

The University of Alabama shut down two student magazines last December — the woman’s magazine Alice and the black magazine Nineteen Fifty-Six — citing a nonbinding memo from then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that warned against “unlawful proxies” for discrimination.

“Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fundamental to our nation,” writes , “and there’s no place where these rights should be more valued and protected than on our college campuses.”

Below the fold

• Florida’s wildlife agency enacted a social media policy that prohibits its workers from criticizing their employer.

• Jane Fonda plans to host a New York concert this Sunday for free speech and democracy on the same day MMA fighters will have a cage match on the White House lawn to celebrate Trump’s 80th birthday and America’s 250th anniversary.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier. Now we turn to Woodrow Wilson, America’s worst president for free speech.

Thousands of arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and even deportations for speech occurred under his stewardship and instruction. He had even successfully established the first modern propaganda institution in American history, which also controlled and stifled the dissemination of any speech counter to his preferred narratives. Wilson’s iron grip on American speech was short-lived, but devastating at a scale not seen before or arguably since. Continue reading…

Terms of service

The Free Speech App is a member-funded platform that aims to give everyday Americans a secure, anonymous way to share opinions, vote on issues, and influence policymakers without fear of social, professional, or political repercussions. The platform emphasizes verified membership, anonymity, no ads or data mining, and the goal of getting elected officials to pay more attention to the concerns of constituents, parents, and local communities.

In the frame

Speechless is a new documentary about the escalating battles over free speech and identity politics on university campuses. Directed by Ric Esther Bienstock and filmed over eight years, it follows professors, students, administrators, and activists across institutions such as Evergreen State College, Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, and New College of Florida as they navigate various controversies. The film argues that universities have become ground zero for broader cultural conflicts, showing how pressure from the political left helped provoke a powerful conservative backlash.

But rather than taking a simple partisan side, Bienstock explores how intolerance, censorship, and institutional failures can emerge across the ideological spectrum, ultimately asking whether universities can still serve as places for open inquiry and debate. And like any good documentary, it offers no easy answers.

So to Speak

So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast takes an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech. Hosted by FIRE’s Nico Perrino.

In this episode, Rainey Reitman joins the show to discuss what happens when people are denied access to financial services because of their lawful speech. Reitman is the author of Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech, which looks at how financial companies like Visa, Chase, and PayPal police silence speakers.

Blessings of Liberty

Bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen’s new podcast, The Blessings of Liberty, explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea.”

In this episode, Stephen Breyer, retired associate justice of the Supreme Court, joins to discuss our republic’s founding principles, the First Amendment, and the pursuit of happiness. He also provides a preview of his upcoming memoir and his foreword for the NCC’s new volume, The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals.

Jeffrey Rosen

A Conversation with Justice Breyer

SHOW NOTES: In this episode of The Blessings of Liberty, Justice Stephen Breyer, retired associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, joins to discuss our republic’s Founding principles, the First Amendment, and the Pursuit of Happiness. He also gives us a preview of his upcoming memoir and his foreword for the NCC’s new volume…

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3 days ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Jeffrey Rosen

This week in history

On June 15, 1215, following a rebellion against his abuses of power, King John of England was forced by a group of nobles to accept the Magna Carta. This landmark document said that no one — not even the king — is above the law. Clause 61 authorized a committee of 25 barons to seize the king’s castles and lands if he violated the charter. Imagine if our Constitution explicitly gave Congress the right to seize Mar-a-Lago if President Trump ignored the law.

The Magna Carta also said no free man could be imprisoned, stripped of rights, or punished except “by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.” That one line helped inspire the concept of due process and echoes through the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, remaining one of the most influential legal ideas ever written. The general principles established in the Magna Carta later influenced the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Bill of Rights.

Its recognition that nobles could assemble and present grievances to the king foreshadowed the rights of peaceful assembly and petition that would later be protected by the First Amendment. In 2007, financier David Rubenstein bought a rare 1297 copy of the Magna Carta at a Sotheby’s auction for $21.3 million. He then loaned it to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

By the numbers

Law professors earlier in their careers are more likely to keep certain opinions to themselves. As seniority and job security increase, self-censorship declines. But one group breaks the pattern. Adjuncts and lecturers report less self-censorship than any rank of tenure-track faculty. They’re also more comfortable discussing controversial topics and less worried about reputational harm from being misunderstood than even chaired and distinguished professors. This week, dives into the data and comes back up with a surprising explanation.

Illinois can tax income. It can tax profits. It can tax businesses. It can even impose generally applicable taxes that happen to reach content mediums like cable or newspapers.

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But the First Amendment strictly prohibits taxes that single out content the state doesn’t like. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Illinois’ new state spending plan does, and it’s poised to soon be signed by Governor Pritzker.

Buried in the 1600-page budget, the relevant provision would charge the secretary of state with collecting a “social media platform fee.” Platforms covered by the proposal would pay the fee monthly, with the size of the bill set by “the number of Illinois users from whom the social media platform collects data within a month.”

Pinpointing where exactly the problems that doom this proposal begin is a tall order.

Doomed in the courts

The proposal’s biggest hurdle is the decades of case law that have squarely labeled this kind of tax as exactly what it is: a regulation of speech.

And social media sites are very much speech. As the Supreme Court stated in the recent landmark case Moody v. NetChoice, “To the extent that social-media platforms create expressive products, they receive the First Amendment’s protection.” That means the government can’t restrict or single out their content for regulation, and that includes singling them out for taxation.

That principle did not begin with social media, or even modern First Amendment law. In fact, it dates all the way back to England in the early 18th century, and in the American colonies with the resistance to the 1765 Stamp Act. That Act, which required publications such as pamphlets and newspapers to pay a tax and carry a special government stamp, sparked the first unified protests against British rule that eventually led to the Revolution.

In Grosjean v. American Press Co., the Supreme Court explained that English taxes on newspapers and advertisements like those introduced in the Stamp Act were not simply revenue measures. They were understood as efforts to suppress criticism of the government by making publication and circulation more difficult. These “taxes on knowledge” helped animate the First Amendment’s strong protections, and they influenced the outcome in cases like Grosjean.

In that 1936 case, the Court weighed a Louisiana tax on newspapers passed by allies of Louisiana Senator Huey Long. The plaintiffs argued that Louisiana’s 2% tax on newspapers with weekly circulations above 20,000 copies targeted the papers most critical of Long — papers he and his allies would like to see less circulated.

That connection between the financial burden of the tax and the potential circulation of the newspaper is exactly why the Court said such taxes “operate as a restraint” on speech. “First, [the tax’s] effect is to curtail the amount of revenue realized from advertising” and “second, its direct tendency is to restrict circulation.”

The connection the Court draws in Grosjean between the financial burden and the circulation of speech is relevant to the Illinois bill in more ways than one. On top of the platform fee described above, the Illinois budget proposal also imposes a 10% digital targeted-advertising tax on receipts from targeted ads provided in the state, a tax which expressly includes “advertising on social media.” Following the logic of the Grosjean Court, it’s another way the Illinois proposal discourages the speech it disfavors.

The holding that taxes on speech are speech regulation doesn’t end with Grosjean.

In 1983’s Minneapolis Star v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue, Minnesota imposed a special use tax on paper and ink used by publications, with an exemption that meant only a handful of publishers paid significant amounts. Unlike in Grosjean, there was “no indication . . . of any impermissible or censorial motive” behind Minnesota’s tax. But that did not save it.

That’s because the First Amendment problem was structural: Minnesota had “singled out the press for special treatment.” In burdening a specific group of speakers, the Court held the law was presumptively unconstitutional. The Court made clear that “illicit legislative intent” is not necessary for there to be a First Amendment violation.

While the Illinois proposal similarly singles out a group of speakers — social media platforms — it also categorizes them based on their content: the burden applies only to platforms where users “create, share, and view user-generated content.” Arkansas Writers’ Project, Inc. v. Ragland is instructive. There, the Court struck down an Arkansas sales-tax scheme that exempted newspapers and “religious, professional, trade and sports journals and/or publications printed and published within this State,” but not general-interest magazines. The Court characterized that content-based burden as “even more disturbing” than the speaker-based burden in Minneapolis Star. Again, it was presumptively unconstitutional.

This line of cases was further backed up for the internet age by the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act, which prohibits discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce. By “targeting large online platforms without a comparable tax on offline media or communication services,” the Illinois Policy Institute concludes the social media tax proposal could be doomed by federal law before even getting around to the First Amendment arguments, not to mention its other problems.

Doomed in the details

The proposal’s constitutional problems are reason enough to reject it. But even setting those aside, its details are riddled with flaws that doom the implementation of the proposal to a mess of confusion and unnecessary burdens.

First, its sloppy definition of which platforms are covered by the proposal would leave a plethora of websites outside the social media umbrella as collateral damage.

Per the bill’s language, “[c]overed platforms” are platforms where users “create, share, and view user-generated content” that “can be viewed by other users of the medium” and “primarily serves as a medium for users to interact with content generated by other users of the medium.”

That casts a wide net.

While the definition would surely include X and Facebook, the list of sites on which users interact with other users’ content is long. That could include publishing sites from Substack to FanFiction.Net, messaging services, review sites, and even crowdsourced fan wikis.

Often, statutory definitions like this include a range of carve-outs to help guide our understanding of their language. Instead, Illinois leaves us with a single explicit exemption: “‘Social media platform’ does not include a not-for-profit organization.”

The proposal’s vague guidance could have straightforward consequences. Content-sharing sites with large audiences but limited revenue streams often run on lean budgets, unlike the sprawling social media giants this bill seems designed to target. Imgur, for example, had at one point 30 million monthly users but two employees.

The lack of clarity around whether a small team like that is responsible for a large monthly fee could be an existential question. This could chill the inclusion of collaborative features that platforms might fear will land them a visit from the tax collector — sorry, the secretary of state.

Platforms are also left to their imagination to discern what exactly counts as a “user” for purposes of calculating the tax. Is a user an account? A unique individual who might have multiple accounts? What about simple lurkers of the site with no account? The ultimate answer could make a big difference in the monthly fee platforms will plan to face.

We’re not surprised to see a proposal like this filled with ambiguities and holes. As states have attempted to turn around the losing streak social media regulation has faced in court, we’ve seen a number of half-baked schemes to find some kind of creative workaround. States have tried to avoid scrutiny by casting their speech restriction as regulating “design choices,” by targeting platforms through the app store, and by labeling their target “conduct” rather than “speech.”

Fortunately for free speech, the courts aren’t impressed. An attempt to punish speech is an attempt to punish speech, any way it’s structured.

Whether leaning on social media platforms or threatening broadcasters, federal officials of both parties have made jawboning — using government power, or the threat of it, to indirectly censor protected speech — a growing stain on American life.

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To fight back, Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden have introduced a landmark bill to rein in jawboning against websites and social media platforms, AI systems, and broadcast airwaves. Supported by FIRE, the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression (JAWBONE) Act would mark major progress toward addressing indirect and unconstitutional government censorship of Americans’ speech.

What is jawboning?

Jawboning is when the government uses threats to force private actors into censoring speech the government cannot ban directly. It’s government censorship by coercion, and FIRE has long warned that jawboning is a serious threat to free expression, especially online. (Check out our full explainer on jawboning.)

Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling in NRA V. Vullo, a case involving a New York state insurance regulator opposed to the National Rifle Association who allegedly threatened its insurance company with fines unless they dropped the NRA as a customer. In other words, the NRA claimed the regulator was going after the NRA’s speech indirectly because they couldn’t target it directly. The Court unanimously said if that was the case, it was unconstitutional coercion.

Or consider FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s threats of regulatory consequences for broadcasters to pressure them to drop Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel was condemned by President Trump. That’s jawboning, too.

Why do we need legislation?

The Supreme Court has held that coercing private parties to become government censors is a violation of the First Amendment since 1963’s Bantam Books v. Sullivan, so why do we need a new law when this is already unconstitutional? The reason is that a right is only effective if you have some way to enforce it, and people censored through jawboning often lack that ability, usually for one of three reasons.

1. You don’t always know you were jawboned.

Say you’re on Facebook, criticizing the IRS. A federal official sees your post and privately reaches out to Facebook, saying, “Delete this user or we’re going to start launching tax audits of Facebook executives.” Facebook deletes your account and never tells you why. Your First Amendment rights were violated, and you have no idea it even happened.

Even if someone at Facebook tips you off, you may not have enough evidence to file a lawsuit. This is exactly why FIRE drafted model legislation last year to require transparency when government officials talk to social media companies about moderating content. That way, everyone can see if there’s any pressure, threats, or backchannel dealing.

2. It’s hard to sue when the censorship is indirect.

The government doesn’t always directly threaten the speaker they’re trying to censor. Often, they’ll coerce a third party to do that work for them, such as in the targeting of an insurance company to punish the NRA. (And to be sure, these episodes also implicate the expressive rights of the third parties.)

Often, the third party is a social media company. Consider how the Biden administration turned the screws on social media companies to pressure them to take down certain content related to COVID, vaccines, and elections. Now we’re similarly seeing the Trump administration pressuring companies to delete lawful content about immigration.

But when the Biden administration’s jawboning faced a challenge in court, the Supreme Court said in Murthy v. Missouri (2024) that it wasn’t enough for victims to prove social media companies removed their speech after the government pressured the platforms to do so. The users also had to prove that the social media companies took down the content because of the government pressure.

Of course, this is hard to prove without the company’s help. When the Supreme Court was deciding Murthy, Google and Facebook had not spoken up about the Biden administration’s jawboning. Only after the political winds shifted did the companies put out statements acknowledging they’d been “pressed” or “pressured” to remove content. Even now, neither company has been willing to say the jawboning was the reason they took any content down.

This all boils down to two important points: First, the government can get away with attempted jawboning when the third party does not act. Even though the threat alone is a violation of the First Amendment, it’s very hard to challenge it unless the third party agrees to censor you. Second, when you do get censored, you’ll have a hard time making your case unless the third party — which has already caved to the government — is now willing to help you challenge the government’s actions by confirming that the government pressure was the only reason for the censorship.

3. You can’t sue for money when the feds violate your constitutional rights.

At the state level, you can sue and seek damages if a government official violates your constitutional rights. This is intended to incentivize government employees to respect Americans’ rights and to provide accountability when they fail to do so.

But you can almost never sue a federal employee for damages when they violate your constitutional rights, and certainly not for violating your First Amendment rights. You can sue to make them stop violating your rights, but you can’t sue to make them pay. And after they’re done violating your rights, making them stop ceases to be a viable remedy, so you get no day in court at all.

The upshot: When the feds violate your rights via jawboning, you often won’t know. If you do know, you’ll face an uphill battle in court. And even if you win, you can’t actually get any compensation, and rarely any accountability.

The JAWBONE Act

The JAWBONE Act is designed to chip away at each of these problems by doing two important things:

1. The bill lets people sue for money if the federal government jawbones their speech.

This is huge. If the JAWBONE Act becomes law, Americans will be able to sue federal officials for violating the First Amendment when they coerce social media companies, AI platforms, or broadcasters to change or take down protected speech. If the federal official did the jawboning “willfully and wantonly,” they’ll have to personally pay the damages. (Otherwise, the government will pay on their behalf.) That means federal employees will be personally incentivized to make sure they’re staying on the right side of the First Amendment when they reach out about speech on social media, AI platforms, TV, or radio.

The bill also provides for liability for when the government makes the illegal threat. This means they won’t escape accountability just because the company won’t help the plaintiff prove the threat was the reason the company suppressed the speech.

2. The bill requires the government to publicly report its communications with social media companies, AI companies, and broadcasters.

While it doesn’t go as far as FIRE’s model legislation, the JAWBONE Act raises the specter of public accountability for jawboning, which should deter officials from doing it. When jawboning does happen, the increased transparency will put more victims on notice that their rights were violated.

The bill also makes it easier for plaintiffs to obtain discovery, requiring the government to share more information about their jawboning. This will help victims prove their case in court.

Putting it all together

Let’s go back to our hypothetical: You’re posting criticisms of the IRS, and a federal official privately reaches out to Facebook and says, “Delete this user.” Facebook then deletes your account and never tells you why. Under the status quo, you never find out you were a victim of jawboning. You never file a lawsuit. The official faces zero consequences for violating your rights.

Under the JAWBONE Act, the government would have to report that communication publicly. Now the official is much more likely to be deterred from jawboning in the first place, because they will get found out. If they proceed anyway, the communication will have to be reported, so you’re going to know it happened. Now you can sue. If the public disclosure didn’t include enough information to prove your case in court, you can get discovery to dig up more evidence.

Since you can show your speech was jawboned, you can win even if Facebook won’t help you prove it. And you can get compensation. The government faces real consequences for violating your rights, and any federal employee who learns about the case thinks twice before doing the same to someone else.

This change would be a huge step forward in reining in First Amendment violations by federal officials, especially as the share of America’s discourse happening on digital platforms continues to grow. Jawboning has proven to be an enduring, bipartisan problem, and we know we cannot rely on platforms alone to protect our rights. The JAWBONE Act empowers Americans to take their rights into their own hands. FIRE applauds Sens. Cruz and Wyden for introducing this legislation, and we urge Congress to pass it.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier. Now we turn to Woodrow Wilson, our worst president when it comes to free speech.

On Feb. 9, 1919 — the eve of an ill-fated vote on the 19th Amendment — the National Woman’s Party burned President Woodrow Wilson in effigy.

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Suffragettes had been protesting outside the White House for years at this point, and were furious with Wilson’s disinterest in supporting their cause. After years of pressure, Wilson had finally paid lip service in support of the cause, but this commitment had come without action. “We burn not the effigy of the President of a free people, but the leader of an autocratic party organization,” suffragist Sue White declared. This sentiment was echoed by protest signs and banners that read “The President is responsible for the betrayal of American women,” and “He preaches democracy abroad and thwarts democracy here.”

These criticisms were right.

Wilson had become quite successful at denying people their right to be heard. By 1919, he had secured his reputation as the worst president for free speech in American history. Thousands of arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and even deportations for speech occurred under his stewardship and instruction. He had even successfully established the first modern propaganda institution in American history, which also controlled and stifled the dissemination of any speech counter to his preferred narratives.

Wilson’s iron grip on American speech was short-lived, but devastating at a scale not seen before or arguably since.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, on Dec. 28, 1856, and grew up in the midst of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. He was one of only two presidents, the other being John Tyler, to have been citizens of the Confederate States of America. It was an upbringing that was consistent with the racist policies and sentiments Wilson would carry with him into the White House. He later re-segregated the federal government and promoted Ku Klux Klan propaganda, such as by showing the film The Birth of a Nation at the White House and lavishly praising it.

Wilson would study history, political philosophy, and German before earning his PhD in history and political science. Soon after, he became president of Princeton University, where he became a prominent advocate for progressive education. He later served as governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913, wherein he engaged in various progressive actions including antitrust laws and workers compensation legislation, as well as reforms regulating child labor and increasing standards for factory working conditions. This won him widespread recognition as a leader in the Progressive movement and made him a prominent contender for the presidency, which he won in 1912.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Wilson was praised for maintaining neutrality and keeping America out of the conflict, as well as for attempting to broker peace between the warring powers. His position was so popular, in fact, that it was used extensively during his reelection campaign, which used the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”

This, however, wouldn’t last — nor would his overall approval by the masses.

In 1917, after several military escalations, the United States officially declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. It soon became important to Wilson to not only succeed in the war effort, but to garner support and tamp down on any opposition. Via executive order, Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information to influence public opinion through the use of all available media — including posters, pamphlets, newspaper releases, films, school campaigns, and more. A volunteer pool of 75,000 men was recruited for the effort, which spanned the country in various languages and formats.

Importantly, the Committee’s duty also included the suppression of any news or sentiment that ran counter to the pro-war narrative — of which there was plenty. Under the leadership of investigative journalist George Creel, the CPI pressured American media outlets to censor news stories. It also coordinated with various other government agencies, including the Post Office, to stifle the dissemination of dissident messaging. In his memoirs, Creel would later gloat that the CPI “reached deep into every American community” and that there “was no part of the great war machinery that we did not touch, no medium of appeal that we did not employ.”

All of this occurred at Wilson’s direction, but the censorial efforts didn’t end there. Shortly after the U.S. entered the war, Congress passed the Espionage Act at Wilson’s behest. The law granted postal officials the authority to ban and prevent the circulation of newspapers from the mail, and declared that anyone convicted of obstructing the draft would face a $10,000 fine and up to 20 years in jail. With this newfound power, the government was able to destroy the distribution channels of more than 70 publications deemed disloyal to the cause.

This was the motivating factor for Wilson: silence any and all dissent. “If there should be disloyalty,” he wrote in a letter to Congress, “it will be dealt with a firm hand of repression.”

The Espionage Act was soon amended into what would become the Sedition Act of 1918, granting even more censorial powers to the government. The revised law maintained the Espionage Act’s control of content sent through the mail, but also criminalized anyone who interfered with the draft or who willfully made “false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States.”

Perhaps most critically, the Sedition Act also criminalized anyone who would “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.” This put into the government’s crosshairs anyone who advocated for labor strikes, campaigned against the draft, showed support for countries at war with the U.S., or who could have been interpreted as having lied about any of it.

With that, President Woodrow Wilson had granted himself and his administration immense power to silence speech, stifle dissent, and control the American narrative through the remainder of the Great War. Under his leadership, more than 2,000 prosecutions, 1,000 convictions, 4,000 arrests, and 800 deportations occurred in response to speech considered incitement to violence, espionage, sedition, and wrongthink. This includes the infamous Palmer Raids as well as the First Red Scare — a series of tribunals, arrests, and suppression attempts against suspected communists, socialists, anarchists, labor unions, and other dissenters.

There’s a poetic symmetry to the fact that Wilson wasn’t actually in the White House the day he was burned in effigy. He had been in Paris for weeks helping to formalize an end to World War I — and playing a major role in the founding of the League of Nations. But the reverberations of his censorial policies continued without him. Dozens of protesters were arrested that day — so many, in fact, that police had to commandeer private vehicles to transport prisoners once their paddy wagons were full.

As predicted, the Senate vote on the 19th Amendment did not pass the following day. It would be subsequent pressure from suffragists and a vote during a special session of Congress — called by Wilson, who was increasingly concerned about his administration’s reputation — that would allow the Amendment to pass in May of 1919. It was ratified a year later, officially giving voice to those who to that point had been silenced.

Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in October 1919, ending his aspirations for a third presidential term. He died in February of 1924 at the age of 67, and he has remained a controversial figure ever since. While many praise his progressive policies and work in antitrust and labor legislation, as well as his efforts to secure peace during World War I, his overt racism and expansion of federal power draw significant and rightful criticism.

But it is his devastating and draconian crackdown on free expression, which remains unmatched on American soil, that makes Woodrow Wilson one of the worst villains for free speech in our nation’s history.

We need to talk about Bama.

The University of Alabama delivered a real blow to the student magazine editors, writers, and photographers who staffed Alice and Nineteen Fifty-Six last December. UA shut down these publications, which focused on women and black students, citing a nonbinding memo from then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that warned against the use of “unlawful proxies” for discrimination.

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What followed was a scene from a student media horror story: Student journalists lost access to their old facilities, and administrators refused to reopen the publications, even after condemnation from student press advocates — including FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative — came flooding in.

Then the next chapter began. Eight student journalists sued UA to get those magazines reinstated and have their free speech rights vindicated.

But we turned the page to find a federal district court’s decision upholding UA’s closure of Alice and Nineteen Fifty-Six — a ruling that threatens student press freedoms nationwide. On May 22, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama ruled the university likely did not violate the First Amendment and denied the students’ request for a preliminary injunction.

FIRE condemns UA’s censorship of these magazines, and we’re deeply concerned by this ruling.

The court disregarded decades of student press law designating student-run publications as student speech, not government speech. In reaching its decision, the court marked the magazines as akin to curriculum, concluding that “decisions about what educational opportunities to offer belong to the University,” and thus are “University speech, not the speech of students petitioning for a particular class or publication.”

That characterization isn’t just a problem for student journalists at Bama. It risks silencing student media across the country if copied by other courts. Student media is more than just an educational opportunity. Student publications are living examples of democratic values in action — forums for student voices to be shared without administrators interfering with editorial decisions. Student media doesn’t exist to be a mouthpiece for the university. In fact, student media can be the most valuable critics and watchdogs of a college.

Citing Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier — thus taking a standard designed for high school into the college setting — the court found a workaround for censoring those voices: just silence those publications entirely. The court reasoned that the university could freely open and close a student publication — and the decision, in the court’s words, “will not be reversed based on the government’s intent,” opening the door for potential viewpoint discrimination that, in effect, “drive[s] certain ideas or viewpoints from the marketplace.”

And on the topic of viewpoint discrimination, the court also ruled the magazines were defined by their women or black-focused content instead of a particular viewpoint, dodging the concerns of viewpoint discrimination FIRE and other student press advocates raised.

Viewpoint-based restrictions on speech don’t merely prohibit speech on a particular topic — they shut down a specific side of a debate, a specific point of view on that topic. In Rosenberger v. Rectors and Visitors of University of Virginia, the University of Virginia subsidized publishing costs for nonreligious groups but denied those funds to a Christian student newspaper. The Supreme Court held that the university engaged in unlawful viewpoint discrimination, even though UVA said its restriction applied to all religious groups equally.

While the district court in the Alice and Nineteen Fifty-Six case decided Rosenberger was inapplicable because of a slightly different publication setup, it’s hard to see why this would make a difference constitutionally, since there’s little doubt that it was the “specific perspective[s] of the speaker[s]” (aimed at female and black readers) that motivated the university to shut down these magazines.

Nonetheless, the students, who are represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, are continuing their fight.

Our work at FIRE is far from over — whether it’s supporting student journalists with our advocacy or working to enshrine free speech protections on campus through policy reform. When performing an annual update to FIRE’s Spotlight Database of speech codes recently, FIRE gave UA our highest, “green light” policy rating, a designation for when a college or university’s policies do not seriously imperil speech. That rating does not itself guarantee a school actively supports free expression or a free student press. It simply means the college’s written policies do not threaten students’ free speech rights.

A climate of free expression demands more than the right written policies. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fundamental to our nation, and there’s no place where these rights should be more valued and protected than on our college campuses. Shutting down publications degrades the “marketplace of ideas” a public university is expected to preserve. We’ll continue advocating for ‘Bama students — including student journalists — to defend their First Amendment rights.

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The ADA is a private organization, so this isn’t a First Amendment issue. But it does raise questions about why an organization that claims to “welcome scientific inquiry, respectful dialogue, and diverse perspectives” responded so harshly to conference attendees peacefully distributing an article from one of its own publications.

The incident occurred outside a conference hall where Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, was scheduled to deliver a keynote address. The Washington Post reports that a small group of researchers quietly handed out printouts of a recent editorial in Diabetes Care criticizing Trump administration policies affecting biomedical research. One of the researchers is the journal’s editor and co-authored the piece. Security staff and police escorted them out of the conference at the request of event organizers. Video captured the confrontation.

Some of the ousted researchers said they believed they were removed partly because the ADA feared repercussions from the Trump administration. Let’s hope that’s not true. But all the organization has offered are weak and shifting justifications that seem to be inconsistent with its stated commitments to open dialogue and viewpoint diversity.

For example, in a statement to the Post, the ADA said the researchers were ejected for “violating the conference code of conduct,” under which participants are expected to “conduct themselves in a professional and respectful manner.” Those terms are highly subjective, but it’s worth noting that, on the reported facts, there is no claim or evidence the ejected researchers chanted, blocked access, disrupted an event, or otherwise interfered with the conference. They simply handed out pieces of paper.

Then, in another statement defending its actions, the ADA cited the “safeguards” it has in place to ensure compliance with its obligations as a tax-exempt organization, including “maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events and functions.” But the ADA was in no real danger of losing its tax-exempt status by allowing conference participants to distribute the editorial.

IRS rules do restrict Section 501(c)(3) nonprofits from participating or intervening in political campaigns on behalf of, or in opposition to, candidates for public office. But the editorial merely criticizes administration policies and calls on “concerned citizens” to contact their congressional representatives. That is issue advocacy — and under certain circumstances may be grassroots lobbying — but it is not urging people to vote for or against a candidate. As the IRS has made clear, “Section 501(c)(3) organizations may take positions on public policy issues, including issues that divide candidates in an election for public office.”

Not only that, but the ADA was not even the speaker here. Conference participants were acting independently, and the editorial itself includes a prominent disclaimer — at the top and bottom — stating that the opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the ADA.

The organization’s rationale echoes a mistake FIRE has seen universities make for years: erroneously claiming that their tax-exempt status requires suppressing the independent political advocacy of students or student organizations. At Washington and Lee University in 2021, for example, the administration prohibited the College Republicans from displaying campaign materials in support of then-Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin. As FIRE explained to W&L, the university had ignored “the distinction between institutional expression and the expression of its students.” IRS guidance recognizes that the “actions of students generally are not attributed to an educational institution unless they are undertaken at the direction of and with authorization from a school official.”

The ADA similarly appears to be misinterpreting IRS rules. Allowing conference attendees to hand out copies of an editorial is not the same as the organization itself promoting the editorial or adopting it as an official position.

If the ADA really believes distribution of the editorial endangered its tax-exempt status, it raises an obvious question: Why didn’t the same concern stop it from publishing the editorial in the first place?

All that said, the organization was still within its rights to remove the researchers. But if it truly seeks to “welcome scientific inquiry, respectful dialogue, and diverse perspectives,” it should avoid this kind of heavy-handed response to the peaceful exchange of views at its conferences.

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But results from FIRE’s 2026 survey of nearly 2,000 law faculty suggest the reality may be more complicated. Among law faculty on the traditional academic ladder (assistant professor to associate professor to full professor), a familiar pattern emerges. Assistant professors were the most likely to report that they had refrained from expressing an opinion because of how students, colleagues, or administrators would respond. This reported self-censorship declined in step among associate professors, and then further among full and chaired professors.

This pattern may not be especially surprising. Advancement through the academic ranks is generally associated with acquiring greater status, job security, and professional autonomy. Thus, law faculty who have already earned tenure and established their reputations may feel less vulnerable to some of the social and professional pressures that can accompany controversial research.

It follows then that faculty at higher ranks were also less worried about losing their job because someone misunderstands something they have said or done. But one group did not fit this pattern. When the analysis was expanded to include law faculty who are adjuncts or lecturers — faculty who are not on the tenure-track and are generally at-will employees — something different emerged. And the data points are directly contrary to other findings involving this population in the broader academy.

Law adjuncts and lecturers, on average, reported less self-censorship than all ranks of tenured/tenure-track law faculty. They also reported being more comfortable discussing controversial topics than even chaired and distinguished professors, and were less worried about damaging their reputation because someone misunderstands something they have said or done. No meaningful differences emerged between the two groups for worry about losing their job.

While the survey itself can’t answer directly why law adjuncts and lecturers are such an anomaly, the structure of the legal academy suggests one possibility. Law schools, like other academic disciplines, rely on adjuncts and lecturers for teaching. But unlike many other academic disciplines, the professional identities of these instructors typically lie outside the academy. Law adjuncts and lecturers often include sitting and retired judges, practicing attorneys, law firm partners, prosecutors, public defenders, corporate counsels, elected officials, and other professionals who teach part-time while maintaining careers elsewhere.

For these instructors, teaching at a law school may be only one part of a much more expansive professional life. Their income, status, and reputation are likely less dependent on the approval of others. Instead, they are there to lend their expertise and teach. Period. And if their views or expertise are unwelcome or labeled as offensive, then it is the school’s loss. Or at least that’s one possibility.

Sure, nobody wants to receive poor student evaluations or to receive a cold shoulder from colleagues in the hall. But for adjuncts and lecturers, it likely matters a lot less what students, academic colleagues, faculty committees, or university administrators think. Thus, for free expression in the broader legal academy the distinction may not be simply tenured versus non-tenured. But instead it may be the degree to which one’s professional future depends on the academic institution itself, and on the broader social reputational system within the academy.

The legal academy occupies a unique position among academic fields, in part because law schools sit at the intersection of higher education and the legal profession, drawing faculty from both worlds. The survey’s findings by faculty rank suggests that the distinctions between ranks in this field matters. Whether, though, the patterns outlined here reflect differences in status, professional independence, or something else entirely remains an open question.

Even still, these results appear to point in a novel direction: in legal education, the faculty who feel the freest to speak may not be those at the top of the academic ladder, but instead those who are on a different ladder entirely.

For more data points on the free expression climate in law schools, check out the law faculty survey report.

This essay was originally published by the American Enterprise Institute on June 2, 2026.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently released a study by David Primo measuring faculty viewpoint diversity through campaign-contribution data. The average faculty donor scored only slightly to the right of progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

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The findings and criticism traveled quickly. John K. Wilson, writing in Inside Higher Ed, pronounced the study “worthless” because most faculty never make campaign contributions, so a sample of donors cannot describe the average professor. On the narrow point he is right: a sample of donors is not a sample of all faculty. “Worthless” is a serious conclusion — a verdict that, applied consistently, would discard nearly every measure we have.

Surveys, voter-registration data, and donation data all have weaknesses; none is complete. The question is not whether Primo’s measure is perfect — it isn’t — but whether it tells us something useful. It does.

Campaign-contribution data record a particular behavior: writing a political check. They tell us about the faculty engaged enough in politics to spend money on it — a minority of the professoriate. Primo matched roughly a quarter of 112,000 faculty to the Stanford contribution database and scored them using the CFscore system, a standard measure that places donors and politicians on the same ideological scale.

Political scientist John Holbein has correctly emphasized how much of the professoriate lies outside that sample: 73% of faculty never appear in the matched data, and restricting the analysis to 2024 leaves 87% out. Those are important cautions.

Yet the study’s limitation points toward its most interesting finding.

Among faculty active enough to donate to political candidates, conservatives are nearly absent.

That is worth noticing because the selection effect should run in the opposite direction. If campaign giving captures the most politically engaged faculty, committed conservatives — who donate too — should be easier to find, not harder. Think of the Federalist Society law professor, the supply-side economist, the Hoover fellow.

Instead, the conservative tail remains remarkably thin — and even granting every caveat, the imbalance is difficult to ignore.

What the study does not show deserves equal attention. It does not prove discrimination, that conservatives are silenced, or that campuses with overwhelmingly liberal faculties necessarily have poor climates for free expression.

Ideological imbalance is not the same as a hostile climate. A department can lean heavily left and still argue well — air disagreement, tolerate dissent, change its mind. Donation data capture composition, not conduct: they show who is in the room, not how the people in it treat one another. The most homogeneous campus need not be the most repressive, and treating skew as proof of repression claims more than the evidence supports.

Still, composition matters.

Universities are not legislatures, and no one should expect departments to mirror the partisan distribution of the electorate. The issue is not partisan representation but whether important assumptions are still being contested. Universities work best when smart people disagree, and a discipline that loses its dissenters loses some of its capacity for self-correction. A department can stay civil, professional, and committed to free expression while growing less willing to question its own assumptions. The danger is not that disagreement becomes forbidden, but that certain questions stop being asked.

Some of the imbalance may reflect self-selection rather than discrimination; conservatives may be less likely to pursue academic careers in particular disciplines. But whether they are filtered out or opt out, the consequence is largely the same.

Other evidence points in the same direction. FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey found that only 20% of faculty believed a conservative scholar would fit well in their department, compared with 71% who said the same about a liberal scholar. Nearly half of conservative faculty reported self-censoring. Survey data and contribution data have different weaknesses, yet they point toward a similar conclusion.

History offers a reminder of why this matters. Ideas once dismissed as unfashionable — from school choice to deterrence in criminal justice — advanced because dissenting scholars remained part of the conversation. Academic fields stay healthy when important assumptions remain open to challenge and there are heterodox voices and ideas in room; when disagreement narrows, so does the range of questions scholars will pursue.

The donation study justifies neither panic nor ideological quotas. A faculty assembled through political audits would be no healthier than one assembled through ideological conformity. FIRE is right to reject that cure.

But the study does justify attention. It does not prove universities are hostile to conservatives; it does suggest that many disciplines have become substantially less ideologically diverse than they once were. Whether that narrowing reflects hiring, graduate-school pipelines, professional incentives, self-selection, or some combination remains an open question. But first we have to acknowledge what the evidence increasingly suggests: the narrowing is real. Explaining it is the next task.

Disclosure: I serve on the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE commissioned the study discussed here; the analysis was conducted independently by David Primo, a Stanford-trained political scientist and chaired professor at the University of Rochester.

Daniel Burnett is senior director of Communications at FIRE and is director of public advocacy.

Princess Fiona never complained, but Sen. Jerry Cirino sure did.

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In May, the Ohio state senator emailed a local police chief, asking him to file criminal charges against a progressive blogger who texted Cirino an image of Shrek… enjoying his swamp stick.

The blogger, D.J. Byrnes, runs The Rooster political website.

According to Signal Ohio:

The text messages include Byrnes’ political commentary, him calling Cirino his oft-repeated and derisive nickname “Young Mussolini,” and Byrnes plugging his own newsletter.

It also contains a digitally altered version of Shrek, the ogre with a titular children’s movie franchise, with his penis exposed. An affidavit with Byrnes’ arrest report refers to the depiction of Shrek as “fully nude with an exposed and erect humanlike penis engaged in an act of masturbation.”

No Shrektile Dysfunction there.

On May 8, two days after Byrnes sent the texts, Cirino emailed Kirtland Police Chief Jamey Fisher, “officially filing a complaint” and asking the police to file charges against Byrnes.

Byrnes was arrested on Monday based on what appears to be the three texts.

He was released after 23 hours in jail, commenting on Instagram: “I believe that the facts presented in court will show that I’m innocent of the misdemeanor charge of telecommunications harassment.”

So… can the government prosecute Byrnes for his speech? Let’s look at the facts.

What is Byrnes charged with?

Byrnes is charged with telecommunications harassment, punishable by up to six months in jail. To be found guilty, the prosecution must prove that Byrnes sent the texts with the intent to “harass, intimidate, or abuse” Cirino.

What does the First Amendment say?

About Shrek’s schlong specifically? Nothing, surprisingly. But it does have a lot to say about speech criticizing government officials — that is, that it lies at the heart of our constitutional protection for free speech. Aside from very narrow exceptions to the First Amendment, such as true threats or obscenity, the government generally cannot punish people for saying things to or about public officials, even if some find the speech offensive, insulting or vulgar.

Political speech doesn’t have to be serious or reverent to have First Amendment protection.

Is this harassment?

The First Amendment also doesn’t protect conduct that amounts to harassment, properly defined. But from the content FIRE has been able to review, this was not punishable harassment.

Enforcing harassment laws stays within constitutional lines when, for example, it focuses on unprotected speech like true threats or a repeated, unwanted course of conduct aimed at invading someone’s privacy or disturbing their peace. Think of someone making dozens of calls in the middle of the night to keep someone awake, or continuing to send dozens of texts day after day after being told repeatedly to stop. But a handful of afternoon texts — including a single image — from one easily blockable number, looks like protected speech, not criminal harassment. Especially absent any apparent request to stop.

Is this obscene?

As with harassment, the First Amendment has a high bar before the government can punish or prohibit something as legally obscene. And this exception to what the First Amendment protects doesn’t automatically apply to speech that someone finds “disgusting” or “pornographic.”

In Miller v. California, the Supreme Court ruled that expression is legally obscene only if it satisfies three elements. First, the material, taken as a whole, must appeal to the “prurient interest” (an excessive interest in sex). Second, it must depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way as defined by law. And third, the material must lack any serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. It’s a demanding standard.

If a work fails to meet even one of these three elements, the First Amendment protects it.

The Shrek image may have been crude or vulgar. But in context, there is no serious argument Byrnes sent it to arouse anyone’s sexual interest, let alone that it satisfies the Miller test. Byrnes sent it to another adult, reportedly accompanied by political commentary describing Cirino as “Young Mussolini.” That’s protected political mockery, not obscenity.

So, can you text images of ogres in a state of Shrekstacy?

Before anyone undoes their gumdrop buttons, remember that, as in essentially all First Amendment cases, context and details matter. But from what FIRE has seen, Byrnes should not be facing telecommunications harassment charges.

Why isn’t FIRE sharing the image?

We don’t have the image and are relying on public reporting. We’ll report back if that changes.

What should I do if I find myself the victim of unwanted images of Shrekstracurricular activities?

The easiest solution: Block the number. Unless, of course, you’re into that sort of thing.

“Free speech is tested by hard cases and, in this instance, the UK is failing.”

— Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship, on the UK banning Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker from the country over fears of antisemitism.

Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker banned from UK

Britain banned Cenk Uygur, founder and host of “The Young Turks,” as well as his nephew, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, from entering the country to appear at events in London and Oxford, citing concerns that their visit could fuel antisemitism. But as Angel Eduardo explains:

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The banning of scheduled speakers from entering your country also betrays an unwillingness or inability to engage with ideas and arguments on their merits. Barring their entry and thinking you’ve shut them down is like having your opponent killed in the locker room before a boxing match and declaring yourself the champion. This, particularly in the land that gave us John Stuart Mill, is pretty shameful behavior. And of course, preventing Uygur and Piker from entering will only increase the energy and attention surrounding their commentary . . . Keeping them from speaking on your shores isn’t going to silence them at all. It’s just going to give them even more to talk about.

Senator calls cops over Shrek dick pic

Ohio state Sen. Jerry Cirino, a powerful Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, personally asked his local police chief to file criminal charges against progressive blogger D.J. Byrnes for texting him political commentary, insults including the nickname “Young Mussolini,” and a picture of Shrek’s dick.

All this led to an investigation that largely consisted of reviewing Byrnes’ publication, The Rooster, and arresting him at the Ohio Statehouse. As Aaron Terr explains:

If all Byrnes did was send a handful of texts, this looks like protected speech. Remember, the First Amendment protects political critics even when they say harsh, crude, or offensive things about — or to — government officials, and harassment laws cannot be used as a backdoor way to punish someone when they offend you.

Below the fold

• President Trump’s proposal that federal employees sign nondisclosure agreements could discourage whistleblowers from speaking about what happens in federal agencies and make it harder for journalists to cover government abuse.

• Hong Kong police stopped artist Sanmu Chen from tying a symbolic red thread to a street signpost in the Causeway Bay shopping district in memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre. They also arrested seven others, including activist Chan Po-ying.

• A D.C. judge is allowing a local group to continue flying a banner that reads, “86 47,” rejecting the claim that it is a threat to Trump.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier. Now we turn to Frank Kameny, a leader of the early gay rights movement.

Born in 1925 and raised in the Richmond Hill section of Queens, Kameny was provided with a solid middle-class upbringing by his father, an immigrant from Poland, and his mother, a secretary from the Lower East Side. As a child, Kameny looked to the stars at night and settled on becoming an astronomer to uncover the secrets of the universe. His own secret would stymie those plans, but his response to adversity changed the course of history. Continue reading…

In the frame

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen is launching a new project aimed at deepening public engagement with the principles behind the American experiment. Rosen’s new podcast, The Blessings of Liberty, explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, the lives of the Founders, and the “American Idea.”

The show hopes to model the kind of civil dialogue that feels so rare in modern public life, and to begin, Rosen sat down with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to discuss his career, his new book, and the state of America:

Jeffrey Rosen

Justice Gorsuch on The Blessings of Liberty

SHOW NOTES: In this inaugural episode of The Blessings of Liberty, Justice Neil Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court joins to discuss the American Revolution, our Founding ideals, and the importance of civic education and civil dialogue. He also explores his recent bestselling children’s book…

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11 days ago · 23 likes · 5 comments · Jeffrey Rosen

This week in history

On June 1, 1927, the Minneapolis tabloid the Saturday Press went to war with City Hall. According to editor Jay Near, gangsters, bootleggers, corrupt officials, and a Jewish mob were running the city from the shadows while public officials looked the other way. The paper quickly earned loyal readers and powerful enemies. Those enemies found a weapon in Minnesota’s 1925 Public Nuisance Law, the “Minnesota Gag Law,” which allowed judges to shut down any publication deemed “malicious, scandalous, and defamatory.” A local judge ordered the paper silenced and the case climbed all the way to the Supreme Court where, by a 5–4 vote, the Court disagreed.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said the power to stop publication in advance was “the essence of censorship.” The First Amendment, he explained, was designed precisely to prevent such prior restraints. If a newspaper committed libel or defamation, that could be punished afterward through the courts. But the government could not slap a padlock on the printing press before the ink hit the page. The decision became a cornerstone of American press freedom. Four decades later, it protected the publication of the Pentagon Papers and helped shape modern First Amendment law.

By the numbers

Our latest data shows conservatives self-censor far more than other students. Also, the biggest source of pressure isn’t professors but fellow students. And the place students feel least free to express themselves may not be where you think. They’re on social media, when publicly disagreeing with a professor, and in class discussions.

Why are conservatives, and especially conservative women, more likely to self-censor? One reason might be to hide their political beliefs from professors (who skew heavily liberal) in order to get a better grade in class:

Only 6.5% of very liberal students say they hide beliefs from professors for a better grade fairly often or very often, compared to 37% of very conservative students, suggesting a fairly widespread fear of bias in professors among students on the right.

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Another potential factor is peer pressure. Are students possibly censoring themselves because they are afraid of what their classmates might say? It turns out that, yes, students censor themselves more often as the likelihood of a classmate reporting them increases, and more than they do to avoid being reported by a professor:

Students who believe another student won’t report controversial comments only self-censor about 11% of the time. Students who think another student is very likely to report speech will censor themselves about 41% of the time, or nearly four times as often. That’s larger than the gap between most broad demographic or ideological groups.

When students think a professor is very likely to report speech, they only censor themselves about 31% of the time, which suggests that fear of being reported by other students is a much bigger concern.

But now let’s consider where students are most afraid to say what’s truly on their minds. On a written assignment? In a class discussion? In a public disagreement with a professor? On a social media account tied to their real name? It turns out, it’s the social media account:

Nearly two-thirds of all students total say they would be somewhat or very uncomfortable expressing an unpopular political opinion on a social media account tied to their name. That’s more than any other setting we asked about. The survey doesn’t ask why, but the obvious difference is exposure: a named account expands the potential audience and preserves the record.

This is not only a conservative problem. Anxiety over social media is common. But in all contexts, conservative students feel the pressure more than their liberal counterparts: in class, in written assignments, and in campus common spaces.

There’s also a striking effect regarding what topics students find difficult to discuss:

Students who find free speech easy to discuss on campus are significantly less likely to self-censor. It’s not a difficult topic to discuss for most students, but the students who do find it difficult to discuss are also generally prone to self-censor.

Taken together, these patterns suggest a variety of factors driving self-censorship on campus, especially peer pressure. If colleges want to stop students biting their tongues, they might do well to build a culture where students aren’t afraid of each other.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier. Now we turn to Frank Kameny, one of the great leaders of the early gay rights movement.

It’s hard to think of an American whose life better illustrates the effectiveness of free expression than Frank Kameny.

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Born in 1925 and raised in the Richmond Hill section of Queens, Kameny was provided with a solid middle-class upbringing by his father, an immigrant from Poland, and his mother, a secretary from the Lower East Side. As a child, Kameny looked to the stars at night and settled on becoming an astronomer to uncover the secrets of the universe. His own secret would stymie those plans, but his response to adversity changed the course of history.

After seeing frontline combat in Europe, Kameny earned a PhD in astronomy at Harvard, and in the fall of 1956, he moved to Washington, DC, to take a teaching job at Georgetown University.

Kameny’s skills were in high demand. The Cold War competition with the Soviets was expanding into outer space, and the following year, he was hired by the Army Map Service, the military’s cartographic agency. His passion for celestial exploration mirrored a personal process of self-discovery, as he began surveying the city’s subterranean gay scene, spending most evenings at one of the handful of gay bars or at private after-hours parties. Fulfilled by his job, confident in his abilities, and increasingly comfortable in his identity as a homosexual, Kameny saw a future for himself as bright as the stars he had begun to gaze at through the starter telescope his parents gave him as a child.

And then his secret caught up with him. On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviets officially kicked off the space race by launching the first satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit around the Earth. Kameny at the time was conducting fieldwork at an observatory 12,000 feet above sea level, on the Big Island of Hawaii. It was an inconvenient place to be when, just a few weeks later, a letter arrived from the Civil Service Commission ordering him back to Washington within 48 hours.

After Kameny arrived in Washington, he waited several weeks before he was summoned to a meeting at Army Map Service headquarters. Upon his arrival, a pair of investigators from the CSC were waiting. They had in their possession the record of his arrest the previous year in a San Francisco public restroom on charges of disorderly conduct. Kameny, according to the report, had solicited sex from an undercover police officer.

“We have information that leads us to believe you are a homosexual,” one of the investigators stated. “Do you have any comment?”

At the time, homosexuality was illegal in all 50 states, classified as a mental disorder by the medical establishment, and condemned from the pulpits of every major religious denomination. All Kameny would tell them was that his sexual activity was none of their business. As far as his interrogators were concerned, this was as good as an admission of guilt. On Dec. 20, Kameny was duly fired, and his security clearance was revoked.

“Are Homosexuals Security Risks?” the gay magazine ONE had asked on the cover of its December 1955 issue. Noting that “howls of righteous indignation” had been raised when Sen. Joe McCarthy smeared Gen. George Marshall as a Communist puppet, the editorial lamented the conspicuous lack of “protest against the infamous blanket dismissal of homosexuals from government jobs without a public hearing.”

There were no civil libertarians willing to defend the due process rights of homosexuals as they did those accused of disloyalty. In January, the American Civil Liberties Union, founded in 1920 “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States,” had decided that it was “not within the province of the Union to evaluate the social validity of laws aimed at the suppression or elimination of homosexuals” from public employment.

Prohibited from working for the federal government, Kameny applied for jobs in the private sector. But because President Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 prohibiting homosexuals from government employment applied to contractors, this Harvard-trained astronomer eager to serve his country at the height of its interstellar competition with the Soviet Union was rejected everywhere he looked. With no source of income and his savings drying up, Kameny accommodated himself to a penury that would remain a constant throughout the rest of his life. Over one particularly difficult eight-month period, he subsisted on twenty cents’ worth of food a day. A pat of butter for his mashed potatoes costing five cents was a luxury he could rarely afford.

Though he had been, by his own description, “shy and retiring” as a young man, Kameny was “radicalized” by the way his government had treated him. How could his homosexual orientation possibly affect his work as an astronomer or, as he one day hoped to be, an astronaut floating hundreds of miles away from Earth’s surface? On the contrary, it was the government that had wronged him. “I simply felt something had to be done,” he recalled.

And so, Kameny did what no gay man or woman in his position had yet done: He fought back.

In late 1958, after a futile year spent searching for work, Kameny contacted the ACLU. In line with its position of neutrality regarding the “suppression or elimination of homosexuals,” the national organization declined to take up his case. But it referred him to its Washington, DC, chapter, where a sympathetic staff attorney acting in a personal capacity helped him file a lawsuit against the army in district court. In so doing, Kameny became the first private citizen to challenge the federal government over its discrimination against homosexuals, a deed made more noteworthy by his decision to attach his name to the case rather than post it to the docket pseudonymously.

It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the cost to Kameny as an individual, or the significance of the societal changes he would achieve, by openly confronting the government over its oppression of homosexuals.

On Dec. 22, 1959, district court judge Burnita Matthews granted the federal government’s motion to dismiss Kameny’s case against the army, and the following August, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied his petition for rehearing. To Kameny, whose determination to right the wrongs inflicted upon him would only grow stronger with each and every obstacle placed in his way, these were but temporary setbacks. Announcing his intention to continue his legal challenge, alone if necessary, the accidental activist set the tenor for what would be a decades-long campaign for equality:

I am not a belligerent person, nor do I seek wars, but having been forced into a battle, I am determined that this thing will be fought thru to a successful conclusion, come what may, and that as long as any recourse exists, I will not be deprived of my proper rights, freedoms and liberties, as I see them, or of a career, profession, and livelihood, or of my right to live my life as I choose to live it, so long as I do not interfere with the rights of others to do likewise.

Opening the nation’s closet door ever so slightly, Kameny lit a path for millions of men and women to follow him out. In 1961, he cofounded the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, one of the country’s first gay rights organizations. Four years later, he organized the first gay rights protest outside the White House.

His constant lobbying, litigating, and lecturing helped bring about substantial change, from the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 and the Civil Service Commission’s lifting of its ban on gay employment in 1975. In 1971, he became the first openly gay person to run for Congress when he campaigned to be the District of Columbia’s non-voting delegate.

A clear and consistent advocate of the First Amendment, Kameny happily debated all comers and defended their right to speak no matter how passionately he disagreed with their views. The fruits of this successful strategy can be seen all around us, in a country more open, equal, and free.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has long defended the core freedoms that make open inquiry possible in America — speech, conscience, due process, and the free exchange of ideas.

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Now, as the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen is launching a new project aimed at deepening public engagement with the principles behind the American experiment.

Rosen’s new podcast, The Blessings of Liberty, explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, the lives of the Founders, and the enduring meaning of the “American Idea.” The show hopes to model the kind of civil dialogue that feels increasingly rare in modern public life, and FIRE couldn’t be prouder to be the podcast’s presenting sponsor.

Rosen was kind enough to sit down with FIRE and discuss the podcast and what it hopes to accomplish in these divided times.

You’ve spent your career helping Americans engage more deeply with the Constitution and the ideas behind it. What made this the right moment to launch The Blessings of Liberty and what kind of conversations are you hoping listeners will hear that they’re not finding elsewhere?

America 250 is the perfect time to launch a podcast that focuses on the Constitution, History, and the American Idea. In traveling around the country, talking to audiences in red and blue America, including rural bookstores, I’ve found that there’s such a hunger for conversations about American history and our founding principles that focus on deep reading rather than partisan politics. With deep dives into history, the Constitution, the lives of the Founders, landmark Supreme Court decisions, and great new books that are shaping our national debates, The Blessings of Liberty will examine not only what the Constitution means, but why the American Idea still matters.

The podcast will bring together guests from across the ideological spectrum at a moment when many Americans feel political and cultural divisions are only growing deeper. Why do you believe civil dialogue still matters, and what can we learn from the Founders about disagreeing well?

In his last message to Congress, George Washington proposed to create a National University whose “primary object” would be “the education of youth in the science of government.” He wanted to bring together people of different perspectives to set aside their geographic and partisan loyalties and to practice the habits of civil dialogue that all the Founders believed were necessary to sustain the American experiment. The goal of the podcast is to model that civil dialogue and inspire listeners to practice it through deep reading of great new books and conversations with thoughtful people of different perspectives.

Your first guest is Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Without giving too many spoilers away, what stood out to you most from that conversation?

We had such a great conversation about his bestselling new children’s book, Heroes of 1776, and his contribution to the National Constitution Center’s new volume, The Promise of America. Justice Gorsuch loves liberty, and the biggest surprise is what a good storyteller he is about the heroes who shaped the Revolution — both the familiar names and lesser-known men and women whose stories emerged from primary sources. He and his co-author Janie Nitze understand that the best way to teach history is by telling great stories, and it was an honor to have him launch The Blessings of Liberty.

Jeffrey Rosen

Justice Gorsuch on The Blessings of Liberty

SHOW NOTES: In this inaugural episode of The Blessings of Liberty, Justice Neil Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court joins to discuss the American Revolution, our Founding ideals, and the importance of civic education and civil dialogue. He also explores his recent bestselling children’s book…

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11 days ago · Jeffrey Rosen

The show explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the broader “American Idea.” For listeners who may feel disconnected from those subjects, why do you think these topics matter in everyday life?

It’s so important for citizens to follow the major Supreme Court cases, read the majority opinions and the dissents, and make up their own minds. They’re written not just for lawyers but for all Americans. By bringing together liberal and conservative scholars of different perspectives for civil conversations, I’m hoping to inspire citizens to open their minds to the possibility that the most convincing constitutional answer may not always coincide with their political views. And without understanding the reasoning behind the Supreme Court decisions, in the spirit of humility that Learned Hand described as “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right,” it’s impossible for citizens to defend their liberties, as the Founders intended.

In these polarized times, it turns out that most Americans agree about the big principles of the American Idea embodied in the Declaration of Independence — liberty, equality, and government by consent — even though we may disagree about how to balance those values. By featuring compelling conversations about history and the Constitution from diverse perspectives, I’m hoping to inspire citizens to read the primary sources, come to their own conclusions, and become lifelong learners.

You’ve interviewed presidents, justices, historians, and leading public intellectuals over the years. How has your own thinking about the Constitution, and about America itself, evolved through those conversations? Have you completely changed your mind on any constitutional issues since starting out?

I spent more than 20 years as an opinion journalist overconfidently insisting that my opinions about the Constitution were right and anyone who disagreed with me was wrong. At the National Constitution Center, by contrast, I wasn’t allowed to express opinions about politics and got out of the habit of focusing on them. It was an incredibly liberating experience.

Honestly, I’ve now lost interest in my own opinions and am more interested in listening to and learning from others. On most constitutional questions, there are good arguments on both sides. When I teach and write about the Constitution, I try to present the competing arguments as well as possible, so people can make up their own minds. I no longer believe there’s a single right answer to most constitutional questions — except for the First Amendment, where I remain an absolutist in the tradition of my heroes Louis Brandeis and Hugo Black.

From campus controversies to social media fights, free speech has become one of the biggest flashpoints in American life. Why do you think so many people suddenly feel conflicted about free expression and what’s at stake if our culture of open debate continues to erode?

People have always been conflicted about free expression. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “the principle of free thought [is] not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” What’s unusual about our current moment is that the greatest threats to free speech are coming not only from the government but also from cancel culture on the left and right — a phenomenon dramatically exacerbated by social media, which allows the instant formation of the illiberal mobs that James Madison most feared. That’s why I’m so excited and honored to be joining FIRE, America’s leading nonpartisan defender of free speech and open inquiry.

This week, in the Streisand effect…

Cenk Uygur, political activist and co-host of “The Young Turks,” along with his nephew, the left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, were blocked from entering the UK this morning. Both were set to give several speeches at SXSW London as well as the Oxford Union in the coming week, but were alerted late last night that their visas had been revoked and they would not be admitted.

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According to a statement from the British interior ministry, this was due to concerns that “their presence in the U.K. may not be conducive to the public good.”

No further reason was given by UK officials, which of course opened the floor up for speculation — particularly from Uygur, Piker, and their audiences. Although none of their scheduled talks were on the topic, both commentators cited their public stance on Israel and the war in Gaza as the reason behind their visa revocations.

“I’ve been banned for criticizing Israel,” Uygur posted on X. “Are we free anymore? This is oppression of Western citizens by our own governments on behalf of a different country!”

Piker made similar comments on his Twitch stream late last night, saying, “It’s a sad state of affairs where obviously the interests of Israel take the highest priority.”

This is, unfortunately, a trend. Last month, the British government banned 11 “far right agitators” from entering the country ahead of a rally organized by controversial activist Tommy Robinson. In January, Dutch journalist and political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek was also banned from entering the UK, three days after criticizing Prime Minister Keir Starmer on free speech grounds. French philosopher and anti-immigration activist Renaud Camus was also barred entry in April of last year for “going against the public good.”

Like any country, the British government can exercise broad discretion when it comes to who it decides to let into its borders. There is currently no proof that Ugyur’s and Piker’s views on Israel were the motivating factor behind their visa revocations, but if they were, it’s yet more evidence of the UK’s backsliding on free speech in recent years. Remember the UK police database tracking “non-crime hate incidents”? Or the 12,000 people arrested in the UK in 2023 for their online speech? And who can forget the UK government’s ominous and Orwellian “Think before you post” warning on social media back in 2024?

Perhaps most disappointingly, the banning of scheduled speakers from entering your country also betrays an unwillingness or inability to engage with ideas and arguments on their merits. Barring their entry and thinking you’ve shut them down is like having your opponent killed in the locker room before a boxing match and declaring yourself the champion. This, particularly in the land that gave us John Stuart Mill, is pretty shameful behavior.

And of course, preventing Uygur and Piker from entering will only increase the energy and attention surrounding their commentary, which already reaches massive audiences — including in the UK. “The Young Turks” averages 200 million views per month, and Piker’s Twitch stream has a daily audience of 30,000. Keeping them from speaking on your shores isn’t going to silence them at all. It’s just going to give them even more to talk about.

“I have the right to speak out, make a sign, and peacefully join a protest without fear of punishment or retribution or worse. I have learned that this fragile thing called ‘democracy’ needs to be protected, that the brilliance of our Constitution begins with the words, ‘We the people.’ I believe in the resilience of our Constitution and I believe in the goodness and strength of the people.”

— actress Sally Field on 60 Minutes in a plea to protect the First Amendment.

California drops probe into student paper

After Redwood High’s student paper The Bark published a front-page image of an anti-Zionism protest banner, administrators launched an “investigation,” ordered content removed, and then denied doing any of it after FIRE stepped in and pointed out the obvious legal problems.

That wasn’t the only incident either. Administrators also told students to alter reporting about the Epstein files after receiving a single email threatening legal action. As , FIRE student press counsel, explains:

The student journalists at The Bark deserve better. When a school receives a complaint about speech, the correct approach is to conduct a preliminary, internal review rather than sending an ominous email announcing an investigation. That would allow the district to handle complaints and offer support without chilling speech.

Below the fold

• A Belgian activist and former member of parliament was convicted for a second time on hate speech charges related to his criticism of mass migration, even though the court acknowledged he based his comments on scientific evidence and statistics and did not spread any false information.

• Romanian prosecutors added charges against influencer Andrew Tate, saying that he incited hatred against women by making sexist posts on social media.

• FIFA, the global governing body for association football, has once again banned the pre-revolution Iranian flag from stadiums, as demanded by Iran.

• A former Ball State administrator will receive $225,000 after suing the university for firing her over a private Facebook post she made criticizing Charlie Kirk in the wake of his murder. Similar cases have recently resulted in settlements of $485,000 in Florida and $500,000 in Tennessee, with more pending.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier. Now we turn to Anthony Comstock, the postal inspector who became our censor-in-chief.

In the spring of 1873, the U.S. postal inspector, a prudish Christian named Anthony Comstock, arrived in Washington carrying a box of dildos. There were also dirty books, naughty pictures, French playing cards, abortion pamphlets, “intermediate tegumentary coverings” (condoms), and enough sexually explicit material to scandalize Congress into legislating the Devil out of Americans. Continue reading…

New FIRE study

Faculty political campaign contributions skew left, according to a new FIRE-commissioned study by University of Rochester professor David Primo. The study found that politically active faculty at 55 major universities are overwhelmingly concentrated within a narrow ideological range, with the average faculty donor scoring only slightly less left-leaning than Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Humanities and fine arts faculty showed the least ideological diversity, while business and agriculture showed the most, though both still leaned left overall. The findings align with previous FIRE surveys showing conservatives feel less welcome in academia and are more likely to self-censor now than at the height of McCarthyism.

Here’s , FIRE’s campus advocacy chief of staff:

The lack of viewpoint diversity in academia is a crisis, but the cure can’t be worse than the disease. Heavy-handed measures like ideological tests or hiring quotas for conservatives would just replace one form of forced conformity with another. Instead, universities should recommit to creating a culture that makes room for students and faculty to challenge ideas from the left, right, and center.

Terms of service

Meta blocked at least seven dissident accounts inside Saudi Arabia, The Guardian reports, while Saudi authorities sought restrictions on 144 Instagram and Facebook items in April. Snapchat also reportedly slowed or removed access to some accounts without notifying users, while X said it had received Saudi requests but had not acted.

In the frame

CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a video of actress Sally Field making an appeal to protect the First Amendment. In “The Last Minute,” Fields delivers a short civic essay on speech, protest, press freedom, and democratic resilience.

This week in history

On May 30, 1967, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude, the landmark novel that helped define the genre of magical realism. Widely considered one of the most influential works of the 20th century, the book has also faced repeated censorship efforts over the years. During the 1980s and 1990s, the novel was frequently challenged in schools because of its sexual content and coarse language. In 1986, Wasco Union High School in California removed the book from its reading list, prompting English teacher Lee McCarthy to file suit. A California Court of Appeals later ruled in McCarthy v. Fletcher that the school board could not ban the book on religious grounds. The vice president of the high school, Gerald Johnson, had recommended the book’s removal because it was “negative ... to the Catholic religion.”

Ironically, García Márquez actually met Pope John Paul II in 1979, shortly after he was announced as pope, and the two men hit it off famously. In fact, they ended up sharing stories as the pope enthusiastically patted García Márquez’s arm to emphasize his points, and García Márquez became so engrossed in the conversation that before he knew it they had run out of time.

FIRE Update

Yesterday, FIRE litigators were in California for our lawsuit challenging the provisions the Trump administration is using to deport people — who are legally in the United States — because the government doesn’t like what they have to say. Nobody should fear a midnight knock on the door for voicing the wrong opinion.

FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick explained that in a free country, you shouldn’t have to show your papers to voice your opinion. Free speech isn’t a privilege the government hands out, and it can’t be taken away by any government official — of any party. We’ll keep you posted as the case progresses. Continue for the full Update…

By the numbers

The government cannot use private tech platforms as proxies to censor lawful speech online, a practice known as jawboning, and Americans across the political spectrum increasingly distrust any system where the government does so. FIRE’s latest National Speech Index finds that 75% of Americans say they are at least somewhat concerned about the government pressuring tech companies to suppress certain viewpoints. Simply put, Americans don’t trust the government to regulate social media.

Harvard has, in recent years, seemingly abandoned its foundational commitments to free expression and academic freedom, the conditions that make the pursuit of Veritas possible at all. It has repeatedly ranked at or near the bottom of FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings, earning an “abysmal” rating for its campus climate. In 2024, it received the lowest score the index had ever recorded.

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Alumni have predictably responded by withdrawing their financial support. By the end of the 2024 fiscal year, cash gifts to Harvard had fallen 15%, the steepest single-year drop in nearly a decade. Others went even further, openly cheering as the federal government moved in to dismantle their alma mater from the outside.

The temptation is understandable. Few institutions look less amenable to reform than a centuries-old, self-governing ivory tower sat atop an endowment larger than most nations’ GDPs. The conclusion that one’s emails and gifts and votes cannot possibly matter is, for many alumni, the conclusion of long experience.

Yet there is a group of alumni who choose to see things differently. They call themselves Harvard Alumni for Free Speech (HAFFS). Founded in 2022, the group has taken the view that Harvard’s present condition is precisely why alumni should not abandon the university, but step in to help restore it.

“Alumni are important stakeholders and must play their part to maintain excellence at Harvard,” said John Evangelakos, HAFFS’s president and founding member. “Alumni should regard themselves as stewards who have been entrusted with passing on to future generations a Harvard that is as vibrant and impactful as it was when they were there.”

For HAFFS, that stewardship has taken concrete form. The group published voting guides and candidate endorsements for elections to Harvard’s Board of Overseers and the Harvard Alumni Association, two bodies most graduates have spent their lives ignoring, but help shape what the university does and does not do.

HAFFS has also convened the kinds of public conversation that has become difficult to stage in Cambridge. Last year, the group brought together Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Heterodox Academy’s John Tomasi to discuss what it would take for elite universities to recommit to intellectual pluralism. This March, HAFFS hosted a discussion of Harvard’s new Intellectual Vitality Initiative with Harvard philosopher Edward J. Hall, Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen, Harvard student leader Ari Kohn, and Monica Harris, the executive director of FAIR.

Other gatherings have brought in the two most recent chairs of the Harvard Crimson editorial board to talk about the state of student debate, as well as FIRE’s Sean Stevens and Connor Murnane to discuss what the 2026 rankings reveal about Harvard in particular.

HAFFS has responded to more acute crises as well. When Harvard found itself confronting the Trump administration’s demand for sweeping changes to its admissions, hiring, and permitted areas of study, HAFFS helped make the legal terrain legible to alumni by hosting briefings with FIRE’s Robert Shibley, walking alumni through the amicus briefs filed in Harvard’s support, and explaining the federal court ruling that ultimately found the funding cuts to be unconstitutional.

This is the kind of approach that is needed: sustained engagement, public events, legal literacy, electoral participation, and working in partnership with groups like FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and FAIR. Each strand on its own would be modest. Together, they give the group’s critique of Harvard’s culture an institutional weight by signaling continued engagement in the debate, rather than withdrawal from it in despair.

The work has yielded results, however partial. Harvard has convened an Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group whose recommendations are now reshaping discrimination policies, and adopted a policy of institutional neutrality that bars the university from issuing statements on most current events.

“HAFFS has been able to galvanize alumni and work effectively with concerned faculty to contribute to meaningful reform at Harvard over the past several years,” Evangelakos said. “But our biggest challenge is to ensure that the reforms are durable. We need to ensure that there is accountability and that alumni remain to ensure there is no backsliding.”

Walking away has its satisfactions, and so does cheerleading punitive measures from the sidelines. But both have enormous limitations. They empty the arena of the people most likely to demand reform and leave the institution to the risk-averse administrators and malevolent political actors.

Engagement works differently. It produces voting guides that change the composition of a board, events that change which arguments faculty will make in public, relationships with administrators who, when a hard moment comes, know there is a constituency on the other side of the table.

Whether Harvard becomes a place where free speech genuinely thrives will depend, in the end, on whether those who still believe in it are willing to stay and do the work.

HAFFS has chosen to stay.

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This was an ordinary act of community speech, rooted in American soil for 250 years.

But federal officials took aim at Kae’s group. They didn’t attempt to silence her directly. Instead, they demanded that Facebook do what the government cannot do itself: silence people discussing and criticizing its activity. Facebook immediately complied, cutting off over 100,000 members from a space they relied on for community information. The attorney general and secretary of homeland security then publicly took credit for the takedown.

But this was unconstitutional. It was censorship by proxy. Jawboning. And the First Amendment forbids the government from laundering censorship through private companies.

Kae’s experience is a more blatant and unsubtle evolution of a pattern previously seen in cases like Murthy v. Missouri: Government officials coerce platforms to suppress certain viewpoints without employing formal legal process. The mechanism is indirect but powerful. Speech is not banned outright, but it disappears because government officials apply pressure and platforms understand the consequences of refusing.

That leaves users with a basic question: Who is really setting the rules of the online public square?

Americans do not seem eager to hand that power to either side. In FIRE’s 2024 Social Media Report, 64% of Americans said they do not trust social media companies to make decisions about what speech is allowed online. That same portion also said they don’t trust the government to do it either.

Americans care not only about what platforms decide, but how they decide. In the September 2023 survey, 78% said unbiased moderation is important, 77% prioritized transparency about government involvement, and 71% supported appeal processes.

In other words, people may accept some level of online content moderation, but they are far less willing to trust systems that operate in the shadows with the government.

That concern becomes even sharper when government involvement is explicit. In FIRE’s latest edition of the National Speech Index, 75% of Americans said they were at least somewhat concerned about government pressure on tech companies to suppress viewpoints. And 77% said the same about government access to user data for surveillance.

Those concerns cut across ideology, but they shift with power. In the fall of 2023, Republicans were especially likely to distrust government involvement in speech decisions. By April 2026, liberals were especially likely to express concern about government pressure on tech companies.

That shift shows how quickly fears about censorship can change depending on who holds power and whose speech appears to be at risk. The First Amendment cannot depend on who’s in the White House. Government power may seem useful when aimed at your opponents, but becomes dangerous the moment it is aimed at you.

Jawboning is particularly corrosive because it is difficult to hold the government accountable for an action they pressured a third party into taking.

The same problem is likely to intensify as new technologies reshape public debate. FIRE’s June 2025 survey on AI in political campaigns found majorities worried that regulation could be used to suppress criticism or chill lawful expression. Whether the issue is social media moderation, government access to user data, or AI regulation, the principle is the same: The government cannot pressure private companies into suppressing lawful speech.

The future of free speech requires clear lines now.

Kae could have let the group vanish. She could have accepted defeat against Leviathan and moved on. Instead, she fought back. Together with FIRE, Kae is suing the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to vindicate her First Amendment rights.

A federal court has already recognized the danger, finding Kae and her co-plaintiff likely to succeed on their First Amendment claims and blocking the government from continuing its coercion campaign.

Her story is not just about one Facebook group. It’s about whether Americans can document and discuss government activity in public without federal officials leaning on social media companies to make that speech disappear. It’s about whether the government can sidestep the Constitution by jawboning people into silence. Simply put, the government doesn’t get to decide what speech survives online. And it doesn’t get to conscript private platforms to do its censorship bidding for it.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier. Now we turn to Anthony Comstock, the postal inspector who became our censor-in-chief.

In the spring of 1873, the U.S. postal inspector, a prudish Christian named Anthony Comstock, arrived in Washington carrying a box of dildos. There were also dirty books, naughty pictures, French playing cards, abortion pamphlets, “intermediate tegumentary coverings” (condoms), and enough sexually explicit material to scandalize Congress into trying to legislate the Devil out of Americans.

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Comstock called the collection his “Chamber of Horrors” and went around showing it to lawmakers like a traveling freak show. The performance worked. On March 3, President Ulysses S. Grant signed what became known as the Comstock Act, one of the most sweeping censorship laws in American history. The statute banned the mailing of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials, along with contraceptives, abortion-related items, and even information about where such things could be found.

The law didn’t just criminalize objects. It criminalized the circulation of certain ideas. Then Congress did something truly astounding and effectively gave Comstock himself the authority to enforce the law. America had effectively created its censor-in-chief.

Comstock came of age in a world of New England restraint during one of the most turbulent periods in American history. Born in Connecticut in 1844, he fought for the Union in the Civil War and served without incident, although he complained about his fellow soldiers using profanity.

Comstock’s worldview was intensely religious. Amy Sohn — author of The Man Who Hated Women, a book about Comstock and civil liberties in the Gilded Age — notes that Comstock idolized his mother, a direct descendant of the Puritans who epitomized the “Victorian ideal.” He also masturbated obsessively and was tormented by guilt over it. “Today Satan has sorely tired me,” he wrote in his diary. “Yet by God’s grace did not yeild (sic).” Another entry notes, “This morning were severely tempted by Satan and after some time in my own weakness I failed.”

After the war, many people began insisting the country was cooked. About 700,000 lives had been lost, Lincoln was assassinated, and the economy was in ruins. But at the same time, the rural republic of Comstock’s childhood was becoming an industrial and increasingly urban nation. Railroads stitched together distant regions, and a trip that once took weeks by wagon or canal could suddenly take days by train. This allowed news and ideas to move across the country at unprecedented speed, helping form a truly national American identity. It also allowed cheap newspapers and dime novels to create a new mass media culture that circulated scandal on an unprecedented scale.

Americans had worried about the disruptive power of mass-distributed print before. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense helped ignite the Revolution by proving that cheaply printed pamphlets could move ordinary people nationwide. Now it seemed, to Comstock at least, the technology that spread democracy was also spreading sin.

As postwar Americans left farms for factory wages in places like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, those cities began to experience overcrowded tenements, labor unrest, and more crime. As fears about crime intensified, so did anxieties about the vices believed to cause them. At the same time, waves of immigrants — especially Irish and Germans — transformed American cities with customs unfamiliar to its Protestant Anglo-American majority. This fueled nativist movements and calls for moral reform. Comstock moved to New York in 1867, where he worked as a stock clerk and with the local Young Men’s Christian Association.

In 1872, Comstock worked to get feminists Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin arrested after their newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, published allegations about a preacher having an affair. Woodhull, the daughter of a con man and a literal snake oil salesman, was a spiritualist and the first woman to run for president of the United States. Along with her sister Tennessee, she was also the first woman to open a Wall Street brokerage firm. But the obscenity law Comstock used to get them arrested did not apply to newspapers. The sisters were acquitted and the embarrassment convinced Comstock he needed a broader federal law.

The following year, backed by the YMCA, he founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and traveled to Washington with his “Chamber of Horrors.” He persuaded lawmakers to pass the federal obscenity statute that became known simply as the Comstock Act. The law’s language was intentionally broad enough to criminalize almost anything Comstock deemed immoral. As the journalist Devin Leonard writes:

Within a year, Comstock seized more than twelve tons of offensive literature, and 200,000 salacious items . . . He kept his collection at the American Tract Society Building on Nassau Street in lower Manhattan, where it could do no harm. But even with the money and imprimatur of the YMCA, Comstock didn’t always succeed in putting smut merchants behind bars. It was the era of Boss Tweed, and the city was a lawless place. Pornographers bribed prosecutors to drop the charges against them. Corrupt state judges tossed out cases against booksellers and rubber goods dealers.

For the next four decades, Comstock stalked publishers, raided bookstores, and helped criminalize public discussion of sex in the United States. His censorship campaign devastated lives. He drove targets to prison, financial ruin, and even suicide — something Comstock actually bragged about. One case was Ida Craddock, a sex educator and writer who was prosecuted for distributing marital advice manuals through the mail. She advocated frank discussions of sexuality within marriage and opposed marital rape. After repeated arrests and looming imprisonment, Craddock killed herself in 1902, leaving a suicide note that condemned Comstock and the legal system that empowered him.

“His concept of immorality cast a wide net,” writes Robert Corn-Revere, who adds that Comstock even claimed that “evil reading” was more dangerous than smallpox or yellow fever, and “considered sex to be worse than deadly diseases. Why? Because he saw sex (and the lure of masturbation — and therefore eternal damnation) in everything.” Near the end of his life, Comstock claimed to have convicted enough people “to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches” and to have destroyed 160 tons of literature and 4 million pictures.

“Comstock once pursued a man for over a year, in a chase involving seven cities in three countries, because the offender sold Comstock a single condom,” write , , and in their review of Corn-Revere’s book The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder. The book, which begins with the story of Comstock, is a riveting if at times disturbing read. Here’s another detail they pull from its pages:

Comstock was physically attacked at various points in his career: once stabbed in the face by a publisher; attacked by a former prize fighter; and punched repeatedly during a court proceeding by an opposing attorney, with a contemporary newspaper reporting that the commissioner overseeing the hearing imposed no punishment, and in fact “said something under his breath about some things being deserved.

Eventually, Comstock became a joke. A syndicated news report from New York in 1913 would say Comstock “has made himself the laughing stock of the town so many times that his ‘raids’ have ceased to arouse any interest.” In 1915, he stepped down from his role as postal inspector and died three months later at the age of 71. Yet Comstock was more than a Victorian scold with unfortunate facial hair. Though he never held elected office, few people have exerted more influence over the limits of speech in America. If Senator Joseph McCarthy embodied the Cold War panic over political dissent, Comstock represented an earlier American panic over moral contamination.

Over time, the constitutional foundations of Comstock’s censorship regime eroded. In United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses”, federal courts rejected broad obscenity standards used to suppress literature. In Roth v. United States, the Supreme Court narrowed the obscenity doctrine substantially. Later decisions such as Griswold v. Connecticut dismantled laws restricting contraception and recognized constitutional protections for private intimate decisions. Legally and culturally, America moved in directions Comstock would have considered apocalyptic. Yet he never disappeared.

In June 2024, FIRE launched a campaign urging President Joe Biden to posthumously pardon DM Bennett, the freethinking publisher who was imprisoned under the Comstock Act in 1879 for mailing an anti-marriage tract. FIRE filed the petition on behalf of Roderick Bradford, publisher of The Truth Seeker, one of the oldest magazines in America and the paper Bennett founded in 1873. The intention was not only to correct a historical injustice, but to underscore the ongoing dangers posed by Comstock’s legacy.

Every era produces its own comstockery. The targets change, but the underlying logic remains familiar. Speech is framed as harm, citizens as vulnerable, and suppression as protection. That’s why the story of Anthony Comstock belongs in any history of American free speech. His is not merely a story of Victorian morality but of the enduring temptation to use state power against ideas deemed socially dangerous.

Dozens of young people stood in a San Francisco park lined with palm trees and town homes, holding a long white banner that read in bold black font: “STUDENTS FIGHT BACK!” Below, highlighted against a red background: “AGAINST ZIONISM — AGAINST TRUMP’S BILLIONAIRE AGENDA — AGAINST MASS DEPORTATIONS.”

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In February, that image appeared on the front page of The Redwood Bark, the student newspaper for Redwood High School in Marin County, California. Front-page photos are meant to grab attention and raise questions, but this one prompted an investigation into the paper itself. This was after administrators ordered the removal of The Bark’s Instagram post this same semester for noting that Marin County was mentioned in the Epstein files.

These acts of censorship are bad, but administrators’ continued characterization of them as benign or, worse, necessary forces us to weigh in. But even after FIRE’s advocacy interventions, these administrators still haven’t budged an inch. So we’ll spell it out.

Eye-catching cover sparks eyebrow-raising probe

The paper’s troubles started with coverage of the local student protest at Dolores Park in San Francisco, including a photo of the banner described above. That image captured a tense moment in local news, and sparked debate and backlash among community members, which is generally a reliable mark of good journalism.

But, feeling the pressure, the student editors-in-chief decided to publish a letter “acknowledging that this image caused pain and concern for some readers, particularly some members of our Jewish community.” They added, however, that the paper’s “responsibility is to present reality as it occurred.”

Days later, an individual wrote to school leaders, “I am worried that Redwood’s student paper decided to publish an image of a protest slogan about Zionism that has increasingly been used as an antisemitic slur.”

Ultimately, the complaints culminated in the district’s senior director of student services sending an email to the newspaper adviser with the subject line, “Notice of Investigation.” The email said an independent investigator had been assigned “to conduct a thorough and neutral review of the complaints filed” about the image. Courtney Goode, the superintendent for the Tamalpais Union High School District, characterized the investigation as concerning “harassment and discrimination.”

Epstein reporting taken down

As noted above, The Bark had also recently posted on Instagram a rundown of all the Marin County towns that were mentioned in the Epstein files.

Like other news outlets, they sought to make a national story local. But this reporting would land them at the center of another controversy. The Bark mentioned French national Gisele Attias Bonnouvrier as “providing models to Epstein.” Not long after, the principal of Redwood High received an email from someone claiming to be Bonnouvrier herself. The person sending the email demanded the removal of her name from the post, threatening a lawsuit if the school did not comply.

“I have a directive from the cabinet and superintendent,” the principal wrote to The Bark staff, “to redact the one name immediately from the post.”

And just like that, based on a single email from an unverified source, school administrators censored their own student journalists.

High school admins aren’t the arbiters of the law

The administrators’ actions caught the attention of local news in late April. FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative wrote the school district on May 6, urging them to end the investigation into The Bark’s front page image and to promise not to interfere with its content again — such as by demanding the takedown of social media posts — both of which violate constitutional obligations and California state law.

As FIRE explained, The Bark is a “limited public forum” — a phrase found on its own website — which, under the Supreme Court’s Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier decision, receives greater student press protections than those afforded to curricular or school-sponsored publications. In cases like this, school officials are held to the more deferential standard articulated in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. Under the Tinker test, administrators can only regulate student speech if it is unlawful or likely to create a substantial disruption to the school day. In addition, California’s Student Free Expression Law specifically protects the editorial decisions of student journalists.

The photo and The Bark’s decision to run it were protected expression. The school’s characterization of the photo as potential “harassment and discrimination” was deeply misguided and shouldn’t have led to this investigation. FIRE’s letter spelled out how the paper’s front page couldn’t be investigated for discriminatory harassment, which the Supreme Court has narrowly defined as conduct that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it “detracts from the victims’ education experience.” A single photo on the front of a newspaper falls well short of that standard.

And that’s where the core of the free speech concerns lie for The Bark. The question isn’t just whether a school ultimately punishes a speaker after an investigation. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held, the question is whether the institution’s actions would “chill or silence a person of ordinary firmness from future First Amendment activities.” That decision is binding on the school district, and an investigation into protected student journalism would do just that.

Then there’s the demand to take down the Instagram post about the Epstein files. While Tinker and California state law recognize exceptions for defamatory student speech, The Bark’s post still warrants protection. That’s because, even assuming the underlying allegation about Bonnouvrier amounts to libel, the post falls within the “fair report” privilege, which protects fair and accurate reporting on official government proceedings, including federal investigations. In other words, The Bark had the right to name the French national in the context of reporting on the content of the Epstein files. Even more concerning is reporting that Goode admitted “no legal analysis was done before issuing the directive to remove the woman’s name.”

Goode responded to FIRE’s initial letter, saying the district “has a long-standing commitment to student journalism” and “remains fully committed to upholding student free expression rights consistent with California law.” The district characterized both matters as “resolved.”

As for the investigation? As Goode put it herself, “There is no investigation.” But, she added, “when concerns are raised through the formal complaint process, the district is required to review them.” But none of this, she promised, will “limit student editorial decision-making or student press rights.”

Thankfully, no single administrator’s belief, however well-intended, is the legal standard. FIRE responded, pointing out that the school had emailed The Bark adviser with a “notification of investigation,” suggesting that the school was, you know, notifying the paper of an investigation. We made clear that nothing in our position required the district to ignore complaints or decline to provide resources to those offended by the image. But when the school receives a complaint about speech, the correct approach is to conduct a preliminary, internal review rather than sending an ominous email announcing an investigation. That would allow the district to handle complaints and offer support without chilling speech.

The district disagreed, saying it “remains fully committed to student free expression rights consistent with California law” and that “student editors make the decisions about what they publish.” The student journalists at The Bark deserve better. Its advisor has taken an unpaid leave of absence through June 2027, reportedly in protest. Regardless of whether the district wants to admit it, its actions aren’t aligned with its obligations to the student press.

What we have now are promises that the district better keep. FIRE will be watching.

— Larry Bushart after winning an $835,000 settlement over his Facebook-post arrest.

Larry Bushart, jailed over Facebook meme, wins $835,000 settlement

Tennessee officials must pay $835,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by retired police officer Larry Bushart, who was jailed for 37 days over a Facebook post he made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“It’s in times of turmoil and heightened tensions that our national commitment to free speech is tested the most,” said Cary Davis, an attorney for FIRE, which helped represent Bushart. “When government officials fail that test, the Constitution exists to hold them accountable. Our hope is that Larry’s settlement sends a message to law enforcement across the country: Respect the First Amendment today, or be prepared to pay the price tomorrow.”

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Below the fold

• After administrators at Cape Fear Community College censored a modern staging of the ancient Greek play The Bacchae, one theater student and former Marine found himself fighting for free speech.

• Clemson fired two professors and one staff member over social media posts about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, then two faculty risked their own careers to challenge the growing culture of censorship on campus — winning FIRE’s Berkson Award in the process.

• A Nevada high school allegedly praised students for protesting ICE one day, then expelled another student for posting pro-ICE stickers the next, comparing the stickers to a burning cross and prompting a federal lawsuit.

Figures of speech

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. This week, we present Thomas Paine — American history’s winter soldier:

On June 8, 1809, 72-year-old Thomas Paine took his last breath inside a small house in Greenwich Village. The next day the pamphleteer and revolutionary’s body was loaded onto a cart and taken to his farm in New Rochelle, about 22 miles north of New York City, for burial. There was no procession, no national moment of silence, no celebration of a life fully lived. Only six people attended his funeral, including his caretaker, Madame Marguerite Bonneville, a friend from his many years in Revolutionary France, and her son, Benjamin. Continue reading…

In the frame

The Big Sea became the week’s standout free-speech media story when this award-winning documentary about pollution, surfing, and Louisiana’s Cancer Alley allegedly had its public screening shut down by parish leadership, turning an environmental film into a censorship fight. St. John the Baptist Parish President Jaclyn Hotard allegedly “vetoed” a public-theater screening of the film, which ties neoprene production to pollution in Reserve, Louisiana. Organizers say no explanation was given 16 weeks later, while a Tulane First Amendment Clinic professor called the cancellation “very clearly a First Amendment violation.”

‘Spirit of Liberty’

On May 21, 1944, Judge Learned Hand delivered a speech in New York City that famously defined the spirit of liberty as “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” Read the full speech on FIRE’s website.

This week in history

On May 22, 2000, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Playboy Entertainment Group that a federal law requiring cable operators to “fully scramble” sexually explicit channels or restrict them to late-night hours violated the First Amendment.

Playboy entertainment challenged the constitutionality of the law, which was intended to prevent children from accidentally viewing adult content. The Supreme Court held that the law, Section 505 of the Communications Decency Act, did not satisfy strict scrutiny because it was not narrowly tailored and because less restrictive alternatives — such as targeted channel blocking at a subscriber’s request — were available to achieve the government’s goal.

By the numbers

We’ve seen before that students who frequently attend religious services as well as students who are studying religion are unusually tolerant of controversial speakers, meaning they are willing to let them speak on campus. This raises a few questions. Are religious people more tolerant? Which religions’ members tend to be more tolerant? In this week’s data dive, we discuss several findings related to these questions. For example, we found that students who choose to identify as Protestant are the most tolerant religious group on campus. Mormon students are also very tolerant. Atheists and agnostics are especially tolerant of left-wing — but not right-wing — speakers. And Catholic students have the lowest average tolerance.